bug#13918: polytonic Greek on Windows

bug#13918: polytonic Greek on Windows

[Grant Reaber]

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Windows provides a native method of entering polytonic Greek via its
polytonic Greek keyboard.  This keyboard, which is based on the keyboard
used in Greece, is well integrated with the operating system and works
in almost all Windows applications.  Emacs should support it since it is
the standard way to input polytonic Greek on Windows (and, moreover, in
my opinion, it is a well-designed input method).  Unfortunately, it
unexpectedly fails to work in Emacs.  For instance, I can enter ᾶ (a
lower case alpha with a circumflex accent) by
typing '[a', but in emacs doing that just produces a question mark.  As
another example, I can enter ᾷ (a lower case alpha with a circumflex
accent and an iota subscript) by typing '[' while holding the right alt
key and then typing 'a', but of course this also fails in Emacs.

There is a related possible inconvenience that I have noted connected
with using Emacs to edit texts in polytonic Greek.  Namely, there are a
lot of commands that I don't remember the key combinations for and run
using M-x, but it is necessary to switch back to the Latin keyboard to
run any of these commands.  Since no Emacs commands have Greek names, it
would be convenient if Emacs switched to the Latin keyboard
automatically in this context (and any other context where Latin input
is likely to be required).

By the way, while trying to send this bug report from Emacs, I noticed
another thing that doesn't work as smoothly as it should.  I use Gmail, and
I think it is possible to send mail through Gmail using its smtp server,
but obviously it will want a password.  But giving the Gmail smtp server to
the mail program invoked by the bug reporting function just failed and sent
me some cryptic error message that the server sent it.  This could be much
more user friendly.  In fact, given how popular Gmail is, it should
probably just be one of the options presented to the user for sending mail.
 (I ended up cutting and pasting the message into my web browser.)

In GNU Emacs 24.2.1 (i386-mingw-nt6.2.9200)
 of 2012-08-29 on MARVIN
Windowing system distributor `Microsoft Corp.', version 6.2.9200
Configured using:
 `configure --with-gcc (4.6) --cflags
 -ID:/devel/emacs/libs/libXpm-3.5.8/include
 -ID:/devel/emacs/libs/libXpm-3.5.8/src
 -ID:/devel/emacs/libs/libpng-dev_1.4.3-1/include
 -ID:/devel/emacs/libs/zlib-dev_1.2.5-2/include
 -ID:/devel/emacs/libs/giflib-4.1.4-1/include
 -ID:/devel/emacs/libs/jpeg-6b-4/include
 -ID:/devel/emacs/libs/tiff-3.8.2-1/include
 -ID:/devel/emacs/libs/gnutls-3.0.9/include'

Important settings:
  value of $LC_ALL: nil
  value of $LC_COLLATE: nil
  value of $LC_CTYPE: nil
  value of $LC_MESSAGES: nil
  value of $LC_MONETARY: nil
  value of $LC_NUMERIC: nil
  value of $LC_TIME: nil
  value of $LANG: DEU
  value of $XMODIFIERS: nil
  locale-coding-system: cp1252
  default enable-multibyte-characters: t

Major mode: Lisp Interaction

Minor modes in effect:
  tooltip-mode: t
  mouse-wheel-mode: t
  tool-bar-mode: t
  menu-bar-mode: t
  file-name-shadow-mode: t
  global-font-lock-mode: t
  font-lock-mode: t
  blink-cursor-mode: t
  auto-composition-mode: t
  auto-encryption-mode: t
  auto-compression-mode: t
  line-number-mode: t
  transient-mark-mode: t

Recent input:
<language-change> ? ? ? ? ? ? ? C-y <backspace> <backspace>
<backspace> <backspace> <backspace> <backspace> <backspace>
<backspace> <backspace> <backspace> <backspace> <backspace>
<backspace> <backspace> <backspace> <backspace> <backspace>
<backspace> M-x ρ ε π ο ρ <backspace> <backspace> <backspace>
<backspace> <backspace> <backspace> <backspace> M-x
C-g σ δ λ κ φ ξ δ λ φ κ ξ λ δ κ C-a C-k M-x κ ξ SPC
κ C-g <language-change> <language-change> M-x r e p
o r SPC b SPC <return>

Recent messages:
For information about GNU Emacs and the GNU system, type C-h C-a.
Mark set
delete-backward-char: Text is read-only [2 times]
Quit [2 times]
Quit

Load-path shadows:
None found.

Features:
(shadow sort gnus-util mail-extr emacsbug message format-spec rfc822 mml
easymenu mml-sec mm-decode mm-bodies mm-encode mail-parse rfc2231
mailabbrev gmm-utils mailheader sendmail regexp-opt rfc2047 rfc2045
ietf-drums mm-util mail-prsvr mail-utils time-date tooltip ediff-hook
vc-hooks lisp-float-type mwheel dos-w32 disp-table ls-lisp w32-win
w32-vars tool-bar dnd fontset image fringe lisp-mode register page
menu-bar rfn-eshadow timer select scroll-bar mouse jit-lock font-lock
syntax facemenu font-core frame cham georgian utf-8-lang misc-lang
vietnamese tibetan thai tai-viet lao korean japanese hebrew greek
romanian slovak czech european ethiopic indian cyrillic chinese
case-table epa-hook jka-cmpr-hook help simple abbrev minibuffer loaddefs
button faces cus-face files text-properties overlay sha1 md5 base64
format env code-pages mule custom widget hashtable-print-readable
backquote make-network-process multi-tty emacs)

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bug#13918: polytonic Greek on Windows

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Sun, 10 Mar 2013 15:31:02 +0000
> From: Grant Reaber <grant.reaber@gmail.com>
> 
> Windows provides a native method of entering polytonic Greek via its
> polytonic Greek keyboard.  This keyboard, which is based on the keyboard
> used in Greece, is well integrated with the operating system and works
> in almost all Windows applications.  Emacs should support it since it is
> the standard way to input polytonic Greek on Windows (and, moreover, in
> my opinion, it is a well-designed input method).  Unfortunately, it
> unexpectedly fails to work in Emacs.  For instance, I can enter ᾶ (a
> lower case alpha with a circumflex accent) by
> typing '[a', but in emacs doing that just produces a question mark.

Please try the latest pretest version of Emacs 24.3, I'm quite sure
this is fixed there.

> There is a related possible inconvenience that I have noted connected
> with using Emacs to edit texts in polytonic Greek.  Namely, there are a
> lot of commands that I don't remember the key combinations for and run
> using M-x, but it is necessary to switch back to the Latin keyboard to
> run any of these commands.  Since no Emacs commands have Greek names, it
> would be convenient if Emacs switched to the Latin keyboard
> automatically in this context (and any other context where Latin input
> is likely to be required).

Patches are welcome to implement this (assuming it's possible).

bug#13918: polytonic Greek on Windows

[Lars Ingebrigtsen]

(The reported bug was apparently fixed here, but then there was a
feature request:)

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> There is a related possible inconvenience that I have noted connected
>> with using Emacs to edit texts in polytonic Greek.  Namely, there are a
>> lot of commands that I don't remember the key combinations for and run
>> using M-x, but it is necessary to switch back to the Latin keyboard to
>> run any of these commands.  Since no Emacs commands have Greek names, it
>> would be convenient if Emacs switched to the Latin keyboard
>> automatically in this context (and any other context where Latin input
>> is likely to be required).
>
> Patches are welcome to implement this (assuming it's possible).

Switching to a different input method in the minibuffer sounds sensible
with this keyboard, but there's already a general method to do that:

(add-hook 'minibuffer-setup-hook (lambda () (set-input-method "whatever")))

So I don't think there's anything further to be done in this bug report,
and I'm closing it.  If there's something that should receive further
attention here, opening a new bug report about input methods (where
Latin text is expected) might be a good idea.

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
   bloggy blog: http://lars.ingebrigtsen.no